Comments on: Bulletproof Logos

By: flashtech

flashtech — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:45:11 +0000

Very often, is abused. People heard that there should be an alt and they put alt=”" in every image tag. It is especially true for the code generated by image host. There’s numerous time the images fail to load (when there are too many on the same page) and I cannot right-click > show image in firefox since there’s no way for me to select it!
Css is wrong

By: Bina

Bina — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 14:35:49 +0000

It'd be interesting to know if the search engines would consider an alt text within H1 tags to be equivalent to headlines. I guess it wouldn't hurt to put the tags around the img tag. Your post is very interesting by the way, Dan. It would never have crossed my mind if I never read it here.

By: Cory S.N. LaViska

Cory S.N. LaViska — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 05:38:51 +0000

For those who don’t know (and those who do), IE displays ALT text as a tool-tip if you hover over the image with your mouse. This seems to be another one of Microsoft’s brilliant ideas to conquer the WWWorld.
Anyhow, FF and Opera are on the right track when it comes to ALT text – it guarantees that the user will never be left “stranded”. It also seems more practical that way – plus, it makes [most] people happy.
And besides, your HTML pages won’t validate if you don’t include ALT in every IMG tag.

By: Billy Wong

Billy Wong — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 09:52:54 +0000

Aristotle:
Very often, is abused. People heard that there should be an alt and they put alt="" in every image tag. It is especially true for the code generated by image host. There’s numerous time the images fail to load (when there are too many on the same page) and I cannot right-click > show image in firefox since there’s no way for me to select it!
“If it’s content, please put something in the alt.” I really want to say so to those guys, before I realize the code on the discussion board are not written by the poster…

By: Denis Defreyne

Denis Defreyne — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 19:47:31 +0000

Considering this does not work in Safari, I guess image replacement would be a better choice (at least for now).
I’m wondering whether removing the alt text and putting it next to the img tag would be a good idea. The image could be put in front of the text, hiding it when images are enabled. (I’m aware that similar image replacement techniques exist, but as far as I know none of these use img tags… correct me if I’m wrong.)

By: theUg

theUg — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 05:35:02 +0000

Firstly, on semantics. Logo (or header as a whole) on the webpage is nothing more than a running title (titre de colonne in French, Kolumnentitel in German, колонтитул in Russian)) and should be treated as such. End of story. For those who is in armored vehicle—no h# tags. ;) As for the styling of "alt" text, I was concerned about it few years back, cause I always wanted to control it. Since I used mostly Opera in the past 4-5 years I didn't really bother about IE, although I think minimally it actually does style some of it if I remember right. I need to check on it.

By: Small Paul

Small Paul — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 19:21:42 +0000

Yeah, I’ve always preferred this method to image replacement. Works with images off and CSS on. Keeps the logo in the printed version. Closer to the XHTML 2.0 way of doing things (i.e.

)
I wasn’t sure about it, because one time (haven’t been able to find it online since) Dave Shea made a comment suggesting that

was somehow distasteful, though I don’t think he said why. But I’ve never figured out what’s wrong with it.

By: Oscar

Oscar — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:50:13 +0000

I quite like the mozilla.org approach… A negative text-indent that displays the H1 tag when styles are disabled.

By: Jacques Marneweck

Jacques Marneweck — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 22:51:22 +0000

Dan, that is quite an interesting find that you found there :)

By: Joen

Joen — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 17:20:25 +0000

Dan: Thanks for clearing that up.
I have been reading your blog for a couple of years now, but never left a comment until now. So while I’m at it, I’d just like to say keep up the good work!